


vagaries and vicissitudes

by aud_k



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Mommy Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 20:39:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2164422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aud_k/pseuds/aud_k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Harry is nine, Aunt Petunia takes a pair of shears to his head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	vagaries and vicissitudes

When Harry is nine, Aunt Petunia takes a pair of shears to his head.  He watches tufts of black hair fall to the floor and listens to Aunt Petunia snap, "— waste of money, _every time_ — well, _not again_ —".  She's just brought him back from the barbers, and even though the man there spent half an hour carefully snipping away at Harry's hair, when she brings the car to a screeching halt in the driveway and barks at Harry to get out, he emerges looking as if he hasn't been.  
  
This happens every time Aunt Petunia takes him for a haircut, so Harry is quite unbothered by it.  Aunt Petunia, however, seems to have reached a breaking point.  She grabs Harry by the ear and marches him to the kitchen.  
  
"Sit — _there_ ," she says, pointing to a stool in the corner, and, after banging through a few of the kitchen's drawers, she emerges wielding a pair of sharp, glinting shears.  She smiles nastily.  
  
Where the barber was precise and gentle with his every stroke, Aunt Petunia hacks away with vindictive carelessness. It feels like a lawnmower was set loose on his head; Harry's afraid his ears won't make it out intact.  
  
He tries not to cry at every twist and shove she gives his head.  Dudley, his mean cousin, has emerged from the TV lounge to stand in the doorway.  Watching this is, apparently, better entertainment than any of the programs currently on air, and he's stuffed one of his meaty fists into his mouth to muffle his laughter.  
  
Harry refuses to cry in front of Dudley.  
  
After a few more minutes, Aunt Petunia stands back and breathes a pleased sigh.  Harry's ears ring with the final sharp snip of the shears.  
  
"That'll do," she says and drops the shears back in their drawer.  
  
Dudley finally loses the battle to control himself and breaks out into loud guffaws.  
  
"But," Harry says, disbelieving, "you haven't cut my bangs!"  
  
"Of course not," she says, giving a stork-like smile, "those'll stay to hide that horrible scar of yours."  
  
Harry opens his mouth to argue, but he's interrupted by the doorbell.  Aunt Petunia sweeps past him before he can say a word.  
  
"Nice hair," Dudley snickers.  
  
Harry wishes he could punch him in his stupid, fat face, but he doesn't dare try with his aunt so near.  
  
From behind Dudley, Harry hears Aunt Petunia say, "Mrs. Polkiss!  You're early!" which distracts Dudley before he can make any more snide comments.  He takes one last gleeful look at Harry's head before turning to waddle to the door.  
  
Harry looks down at his clenched hands.  He's covered in bits of hair, which is becoming unbearably itchy everywhere, but worse than that is the humiliation of it all.  His eyes are starting to burn and his nostrils are getting thick, and it's the ache inside that hurts more than any of the sharp twists his aunt gave his head.  
  
_Not gonna cry_ , he thinks, blinking furiously.  _Not — gonna — cry._  
  
Crying never does any good; it only earns him longer punishments for "being a pansy" (as Uncle Vernon says) and screeches from Aunt Petunia to keep his snotty fingers off of things.  
  
It's so unfair.  Dudley throws tantrums all the time, and all he gets are kisses from Aunt Petunia and chuckles from Uncle Vernon.  
  
From the hallway, he hears Aunt Petunia say, "Have fun, Diddykins!"  
  
"It's gonna be awesome!" comes the squeaky voice of Dudley's friend, Piers Polkiss, and then the front door shuts and Aunt Petunia comes back into the kitchen.  Her smile drops when she spots Harry still sitting on the stool.  
  
"Well?" she snaps.  "Sweep up that hair!  And — go take a shower!  I don't want you tracking hair all over the place!  You'd be worse than a cat!"  
  
Harry relishes the shower, but all of the happiness it brings him evaporates when he glimpses the tip of his reflection in the bathroom mirror.  He drags a footstool over so he can see his entire face, and he instantly wishes he hadn't.  
  
He looks like a naked mole rat with a bunch of black string taped onto its head.

  
  
With a jolt, he realizes that tomorrow is Monday: he has school tomorrow.  _Oh no_ , he thinks, _oh no oh no oh no_.  It's not like the other kids need anything else to make fun of him about — his baggy clothes, broken glasses, and lack of parents already make him a prime target, not to mention the fact that he's the favorite punching bag of Dudley's gang.  
  
He imagines Isabelle McCarter and Kayley Allen's giggles and Marcus Farrington's caws of laughter and — worst of all — Mrs. Miller's pursed lips and steely eyes.  
  
Harry spends the next hour sitting in a corner of the quiet lounge room, thinking over and over about how awful tomorrow will be.  Aunt Petunia is in the kitchen, muttering her disdain for Mrs. Polkiss (who wears the clothes of a trumped up call girl, apparently) and clacking and whirring as she cleans and bakes biscuits, but Harry barely hears any of it over the jeers and sneers that echo in his head.  
  
Eventually Aunt Petunia comes into the lounge room to tidy up, and she straightens when she spots Harry.  
  
She narrows her eyes.  "If you're just planning to lie about, you better make yourself useful!"  She thinks for a moment.  "Go clean the extra bedroom!  It's filthier than a rat's nest!"  
  
Harry squints at his aunt.  He distinctly remembers her asking Dudley to clean the room a few days ago, just as much as he distinctly remembers Dudley glued to the telly every moment of the weekend.  (Before he'd left earlier to play golf with his boss, Uncle Vernon had chuckled at the sight of Dudley, saying proudly, "Our little man likes to learn; he's gonna go far in life, I'm telling you, Petunia!")  
  
Harry rather thinks it shouldn't be _his_ job to clean a room he usually isn't even allowed into, but then it occurs to him that he may be able to sneak a few things out of there while he works.  He's fairly sure the toy helicopter that Dudley got last year and broke within a few hours is stashed away in there, and even if it doesn't fly any more, Harry would love to look at it.  
  
"Fine," he says and goes up to the extra bedroom.  
  
The room itself has gone through various incarnations.  When Harry was a baby, it was Uncle Vernon's study, but then he got a promotion and was at work more often, so it turned into Aunt Petunia's work room.  She moved her sewing machine and things into it, except then she complained that it was too stuffy in the summer and too cold in the winter, so she stopped using it.  From there, it naturally metamorphosed into a room for Dudley's cast-off toys.  Every year since, it's become more and more cluttered.  Whenever a newly broken toy needs to be put away, Dudley simply chucks it into the room and leaves it wherever it falls.  
  
Harry surveys the mess.  It looks like a bomb went off, leaving only a bookshelf or two of Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia's things in mysteriously neat condition.  Cleaning everything will take a _very_ long time.  
  
Indeed, after an hour, Harry has still only managed to clear off a small patch in the corner near the bookshelves.  It's very difficult work because a number of Dudley's cast-offs are too heavy for Harry to move.  The television set Dudley put his foot through last year, for instance, is just going to have to stay on its side in front of the writing desk.  
  
After a few minutes of fruitlessly shoving at the TV, Harry flops down on the floor for a moment of rest.  He wipes his sweaty brow and flinches when he feels the catastrophe of his hair.  The only good thing so far about cleaning the room is that it had taken his mind off of tomorrow.  
  
Shaking his head to try to throw those thoughts off, he catches sight of the books on the shelf nearest to him.  A bunch of the books have years written on their spines, and Harry sits up to pull one out.  It falls open to a page of photographs, and Harry realizes with a jolt of surprise that those people in them are his aunt and uncle, only ten years younger. Uncle Vernon doesn't have a thick mustache and Aunt Petunia's hair is shorter, but it's a bit funny how much they look the same.  
  
Fascinated, Harry flips through the book to discover it full of photos like this.  He pulls out more books, and they all turn out to be photo albums.  There's his aunt and uncle's wedding, with a lot of people Harry's never seen, and there are various photos from vacations in France, the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe standing proudly in the background.  Aunt Petunia's belly grows rounder and rounder in one book and then suddenly all of the photos are of a squishy pink ball Harry knows is Dudley.  Harry sticks out his tongue, puts that book away, and then goes to the other end of the shelf.  
  
The book he pulls out next is a lot older than the others.  The edges of the cover are frayed and a lot of the photos inside are in black and white.  He goes through this book more slowly.  
  
It starts with baby photos and some official-looking documents Harry doesn't bother trying to read, and then it follows a young girl through her school years.  A few pages in, when the girl is only a little younger than Harry and is developing large horse-like teeth and a long neck, Harry realizes that it's his aunt, and he stares at the photos in renewed fascination.  He'd never thought about his aunt once being as young as he is.  He tries to imagine a young girl who calls her neighbors nasty names and obsessively cleans everything and mutters about bad drivers, but his brain gives out because it's too strange.

He turns another page and stops.  There's only one photo, and it's in color.  There are two girls grinning from a park bench, the one who Harry now recognizes as Aunt Petunia rather more composed than the other girl, who has grass stains on her knees and elbows.  He stares at the other girl.  She's quite pretty, with twinkling green eyes and long red hair that not even the photo's age can dull.  There's something about her . . .

Those eyes . . .  
  
Harry gasps.  
  
They're the same eyes that peer at him from mirrors.  
  
Aunt Petunia had a sister.  
  
Harry had a mother.  
  
He presses his small fingers to the girl in the photo, as if he can touch her through the paper.  When this fails, he pulls the book up and presses it to his chest, over his heart.  
  
But it's still just paper, and Harry gives a sobbing sort of gasp.  He imagines this girl coming out of the book and kissing him on the forehead (over his ugly, ugly scar) and stroking a kind hand over his now-prickly head and leading him somewhere far, far away from the Dursleys.  
  
He pulls the book back from his heart so he can look at it once more.  The girl in the photo smiles widely at him, and Harry's eyes hurt but he can't look away.  
  
He doesn't know how long he sits there and stares.  He hears the clink of china and the whispers and laughter of gossip from downstairs where Aunt Petunia is having afternoon tea with a couple of neighborhood friends, but none of this matters to Harry.  
  
Eventually he hears the crunch of a car pulling into the driveway and then the heavy footsteps of his uncle, back from golfing.  
  
The sounds are like a clarion, and suddenly Harry's spine feels like it's made out of metal, his arms out of electricity.  If Uncle Vernon finds him here he will undoubtedly kick Harry out and lock him in his cupboard for the evening, and then — then Harry won't be able to see the photo again.  
  
With clumsy, frantic fingers, Harry peels the photo off of its page, and he tucks it into the waistband of his underwear at the small of his back (the only place under his too-big clothes that the photo will stay put).  Then he flips through the rest of the album for more photos of his mum, but there's only Petunia, Petunia, Petunia.  He shoves the book back onto the shelf.  
  
Seconds later, Uncle Vernon stomps up the stairs, and along his way to his and Aunt Petunia's bedroom, already loosening his tie, he pauses in the open doorway to the extra bedroom.  
  
When he spots Harry, his expression turns dark.  "Boy!  What are you doing in there?!  I _told_ you — "  
  
"Aunt Petunia told me to clean it," Harry says quickly.  
  
Uncle Vernon surveys the mess and sneers.  "And you just loafed about instead!  Out, boy!"  He points to the stairs behind him.  
  
Harry skulks past him, only too happy to leave now that he has his photo.

  
  
His uncle's beady eyes follow him, his gaze caught on Harry's mess of hacked hair.  Uncle Vernon looks like he just bit into a rotten lemon.  
  
Later that night, once the Dursleys are in bed and Harry is safely curled up in his cupboard, he pulls the photo out and looks at it.  
  
Absent-mindedly, he reaches up to scratch his head, and instantly his joy from looking at his mother is shrouded by dread for tomorrow.  
  
_Mum, Mum_ , he thinks, finally letting the tears fall, _why did you leave me?  Mum, I wish you were here_.  Harry doesn't know anything about his mother — except, now, what she looked like — but somehow, he knows that she loved him with all her heart.  He knows that if she were still here, she would kiss him and hug him and make him hot chocolate and she would never, ever cut his hair away in a fit of anger and later laugh about it.  
  
A gulping sadness squeezes his heart, and Harry falls asleep sobbing.  
  
* * *  
  
He has a dream that night, something blurry and warm, and what he later remembers most about it is a cascade of auburn hair curled around him like a shield, the smell of roses, and strong arms holding him tight.  
  
In the dream, he sighs and winds small, plump fingers into the hair, and it feels like home.  
  
* * *  
  
When Harry wakes up, he feels like his head has been stuffed full of cotton.  His eyes and nose are crusty, and his throat may as well be full of gravel.  He jerks out from under his sheets when, a moment later, Aunt Petunia raps on his door and says, "Up!  Get up, boy!"  
  
Harry rubs his face on his pillow and moves to sit up, but he stops when he drops his hand on something sticky.  He realizes in an instant that it's his photo, and he clutches it safely to his chest.  It's a bit wrinkly around the edges from a night spent under Harry's lolling body, but it's still almost perfectly intact.  There's just one tear stain on it, blotching Aunt Petunia's dress.  Harry rubs it gently against his shirt to try to clean it.  
  
It's in doing so that he notices the handwriting on the back.  It takes him a moment to parse out the hastily scribbled words, but eventually they come around.  
  
_Lily & Petunia, August 1969_  
  
"Lily," Harry says and cradles the name on his tongue.  _Lily, Lily, Lily, Lily, Lily . . ._  
  
He tucks the photo under his pillow and then walks into the kitchen, trying not to smile. He feels like he might float through the ceiling.  
  
"Finally up, are you," Aunt Petunia snaps from the stove, where she's making oatmeal.  After a moment, she twists the stove burner off and turns to him — and screams.  
  
The sound instantly banishes the bubbly feeling from his belly, and he looks at her in shock.  Then he remembers the stool and the shears and the shower and the mirror, and anger pops in the place of the bubbles because — well, _she's_ the one who did it!  
  
The stairs whine as Uncle Vernon thunders down them, beckoned by Aunt Petunia's scream, and when he appears in the kitchen, his face is red.  
  
"Vernon!  _Vernon_!" Aunt Petunia cries, but she can't seem to say anything else, palm pressed hard to her chest.  With her other hand, she gestures madly at Harry.  
  
Uncle Vernon takes one look at him, and then his red face turns purple with rage.  
  
"BOY, WHAT DID YOU DO?!"  
  
Dudley appears behind Uncle Vernon, and when he catches sight of Harry his smirk drops into a gape.  
  
"Me?" says Harry.  "She's the one who gave me the stupid haircut!"  
  
This is, apparently, the wrong thing to say.  Uncle Vernon strides menacingly toward Harry, spitting out from under his quivering mustache, "DON'T — GET — SMART — WITH — ME!"  
  
His shadow looms over Harry, and Harry — Harry tries to run out of the kitchen.  In a shockingly fast move, Uncle Vernon snatches at him, and there's a sharp pain in his head before he falls.  
  
Harry breathes heavily against the cool linoleum floor and tries to work out what just happened.  His scalp is still smarting.  
  
He realizes after a moment of utter silence in the kitchen that instead of the white of the linoleum, all he sees is red.  Wild locks of deep red hair surround him.  
  
Harry sits up in shock.  The red hair follows him.  
  
"I'm warning you, boy," Uncle Vernon snarls, "you better undo — _that_!"  
  
Gingerly, Harry picks up a lock of hair from his shoulder and looks at it in awe.  He tugs at it and feels it pull at his scalp.  He looks over and sees his reflection in the oven door, and it's the most bizarre thing he's ever seen.  It's him, but not him.  It's his green eyes and his broken glasses and his thin face and his ratty t-shirt, but instead of short black hair, he now has a mane of red hair tumbling over his shoulders and down his back.

  
  
It looks so much like his mum's hair in that photo that all of his emotions tangle and get caught in a hiccup in his throat.  He looks at his reflection and thinks it's the most wonderful thing he's ever seen.  
  
"BOY, LISTEN TO ME!" Uncle Vernon yells and approaches Harry once more.  
  
Harry scrambles away and says, " _No_!"  
  
His uncle stops short.  "What?"  
  
"This is my hair!  You can't do anything to it!"  
  
"The hell I can't!  In this house, you'll do as I say!  _Turn it back_!"  
  
" _I didn't do it_!" Harry shouts back.  He doesn't understand how he got this hair, but nothing is going to take it from him now that he has it.  
  
"We can't let him out like that, Vernon!" Aunt Petunia says.  "How would we explain it?"  
  
Uncle Vernon sets his jaw.  "Right.  If the boy won't rid of it, then we will.  Get a razor, Petunia."  
  
Harry's aunt nods, tightlipped and pale, and pulls open the drawer she dropped the shears into yesterday.  
  
" _NO_!" Harry yells, desperation like a hole in his chest.  "This hair is mine, you _can't_!"  He squints his eyes shut and curls into a tight ball, his thin arms wrapped protectively over his head.  " _Nononononononononono_ —" he says.  
  
He hears his aunt rifle through the drawer and shut it loudly, but instead of coming at him, she opens another drawer — then another — then another —  
  
"They're all gone!" she says, voice shrill.  
  
"What?"  
  
"All our knives and scissors are gone!  I — Vernon, even my bench scraper is gone!"  
  
Harry stops his mantra and looks up at his aunt and uncle, who are both frozen in place and white as ghosts.  Then Uncle Vernon turns to look at him, his face twisted into a snarl.  
  
"BOY!" he roars.  
  
"I didn't do it!" Harry yells and scrambles back toward the doorway, where Dudley is watching with wide eyes.  
  
Uncle Vernon advances toward him.  "We take you in — we feed you, we put a roof over your ungrateful head — and _how do you repay us_?!  YOU LYING, STEALING, FILTHY — YOU'RE JUST LIKE YOUR FATHER!  — BOTH A WORTHLESS WASTE OF SPACE!"  
  
" _Shut up_!" Harry yells, hands clenching into fists so tight his bones hurt.  
  
"SHOULDN'T HAVE EXPECTED MORE FROM YOUR KIND!  WELL, I'LL _BEAT_ THE FREAKISHNESS OUT OF YOU, BOY!  IF I'D'AH HAD THE CHANCE, I WOULD'VE SHOWN YOUR GOOD-FOR-NOTHING FATHER A GOOD WALLOP, TOO!  MAYBE IT WOULD'VE HELPED YOUR BRAINLESS MOTHER, TOO!"  
  
" _SHUT UP_!" Harry screams, and multiple things happen at once.  
  
All of the stove's burners belch angry-looking flames; the glass of orange juice Aunt Petunia had set on the table for Dudley explodes, sending a cascade of juice all over; Dudley squeals with fright; Aunt Petunia screams; and Uncle Vernon yelps.  
  
"YOU — _FREAK_ —!" Uncle Vernon yells over Dudley's whimpers and makes to charge Harry like an enraged bull.  
  
" _VERNON, STOP_!" Aunt Petunia screams, rattling the windows with the force of it.  
  
And then it's quiet.  The only sound is the rasp of Uncle Vernon's furious breaths.  
  
Eventually his breathing evens out, and he straightens, dragging a meaty hand over his sweaty brow.  He points at Harry and says, "You — go to your cupboard — _and stay there_!"  
  
Harry doesn't move.  "You're not touching my hair."  
  
Uncle Vernon's face twists up, but Aunt Petunia steps forward and puts a thin, shaky hand on his arm before he can explode again.  Without looking at Harry, she says, "Do as your uncle says."

  
  
Harry says furiously, "You're not _ever_ touching my hair again," and then he dashes to his cupboard, slamming its door shut behind him.  
  
* * *  
  
The Dursleys keep him locked in the cupboard for two days.  
  
On Wednesday, Harry wakes up to Aunt Petunia screeching at him to get up and ready for school.  As she drives him and Dudley to class, she scowls and mutters nasty, angry things at every car they pass.  Dudley looks at Harry with something like fear.  
  
Before class starts, Aunt Petunia explains to Mrs. Miller, Harry's teacher, that Harry — criminal idiot that he is — superglued a wig to his head, and there's nothing to be done about it.  Harry is not best pleased by this explanation, nor by the giggles and catcalls he gets all day for it, but strangely enough none of it bothers him overly much.  
  
Somehow, inexplicably, illogically, he knows that his new hair — his crazy, beautiful new hair — is a blessing from his mother.  She — _her name is Lily_ , he thinks — gave him this present, and there is nothing that could make him wish he didn't have it, not mean words, not threats of violence.  None of it matters as much as having this connection to his mother.  
  
The certainty of this conviction is like a shield against everyone who looks at him and thinks that he's a worthless freak.  
  
Harry Potter is nine years old, and for the first time in his life, he thinks he knows what it means to be loved.  


**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed reading this little ditty!!! 
> 
> okay, for some explanations! i know that changing harry's hair seems a fairly frivolous thing to do, but to me, it's more than just hair: with different hair, he's no longer perceived as a carbon copy of his father, and this changes things for harry. honestly, the idea of a son looking exactly like his father profoundly disturbs me in a way that i haven't entirely worked out yet -- but i think a lot of it has to do with autonomy and self-determination. particularly in harry's case, almost his entire life is defined by what other, older people do to him, whether it's the dursleys or dumbledore or voldemort or snape or etc. and a lot of this seems tied into all these bloodlines/legacies he's cosmically trapped in, like the world has a specific order that can't ever be changed. changing his hair is thus a symbolic thing to me, because that order? - can totally be changed.
> 
> this story is open-ended. i might write more in this world, but i might not! we'll see! but i hope that even if i don't continue it, this bit stands up as a solid story all in its own.
> 
> [ visit my tumblr [here](http://aud-works.tumblr.com) to see more things i've created! ]


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